Two Reception Histories of Schiller's Dramatic Works

David Pugh. Schiller's Early Dramas. A Critical History (Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2000). Pp. xxx + 231. $59.00.

Kathy Saranpa. Schiller's Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, and Die Jungfrau von Orleans. The Critical Legacy (Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2002). Pp 169. $59.00.

Ironically, though not surprisingly, the history of Schiller reception has proven that the most durable scholarship on Schiller's works appears during those brief periods when Schiller's works are of relatively little political use or relevance, or when Schiller scholars are free and able to subvert political use or relevance. The ideological vacuum in Schiller scholarship since the fall of the Berlin Wall presents the current opportunity to reassess the history of Schiller reception if not sine ira et studio then significantly more so than has proven true in the past.

David Pugh's Schiller's Early Dramas. A Critical History, traces in chronological order the four dramas widely considered to comprise a first and distinctive pre-Kantian (von Wiese) and "revolutionary" (Lukacs) phase in Schiller's work, namely, Die Räuber, Kabale und Liebe, Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua, and Don Carlos. The volume is conceptually divided into an introduction including excellent synopses of the four dramas as well as a very helpful summary of surveys of scholarship on Schiller's works and historical reception; a first part documenting the most significant trends in then contemporary neoclassical reception, followed by judicious surveys and discussions of nineteenth century, "Age of Geistesgeschichte" (1905-45), and post-1945 reception; a shorter second part comprising four essays on the critical history of the four individual dramas; and a brief conclusion and outlook.

Pugh's book in its entirety is very accessible, suitable for use by Schiller scholars and in both graduate and undergraduate seminars interested in the reasons for the ambivalent resonance of Schiller's early dramas over the past two centuries. Doggedly pursuing the question of what is at stake in each of the ideological shifts in the portrayal of Schiller, shifts that have invariably been accompanied by episodes of political crisis in Germany, Pugh follows Schiller's adoption and co-option as the poet of freedom by the active German liberals of the mid-nineteenth century and the decline of the moral and political commitment of 1848, then Schiller as the impotent idealist of the decadent and delusional Wilhelminian "liberalism of spirit," to the fabricated view of Schiller as a nationalist and anti-Semite before and during the Third Reich. Of particular morbid interest are the accompanying descriptions of the Schiller celebrations of the past two centuries, from the hysterical 1859 celebrations of the Schiller centenary to the "vapid and hypocritical idealism of 1905" on the centenary of Schiller's death, to the "abstract, rhetorical, and oracular" criticism of the Geistesgeschichte movement in the first half of the twentieth century, and the "bewilderment" of the 1955 and 1959 celebrations of the two Germanys. It is often not Schiller's works that have been the actual object of contention, but external political pressures, such as the embarrassing notion of Schiller's failure to prevent the Third Reich: "If the German liberals failed so disastrously . . ., and if Schiller was their favorite poet, . . . must not . . . some of the blame be attached to Schiller himself . . .?" (xvi).

In a book so useful and even-handed, it is difficult to choose which of the volume's many contributions ranks as most important, though the brief first chapter on the original reception of Schiller's works contains a wealth of information of particular interest to those researching or teaching Schiller's early dramas. For the most part, contemporary critics of Die Räuber and Fiesco admit to the author's apparent genius, without stating exactly why, but almost uniformly bemoan the violence, indecency, implausibility, and its "possible harmful influence," a great deal of which the critics blamed on the widespread tendency to attempt...